When I attempt to publish to DVD ISO or DVD, PE13 saves nothing. That is to say, it goes through the process of rendering for many minutes and says finally it has successfully completed the process.. but the folder I pointed it to is empty. Tons of space over there too. I am attempting to generate a DVD from 4 .MOV files totalling a little over 4 minutes of footage with no menus.

I thought you might find the following copy of a September 2014 PRE_help post that went into detail on that preference "Use Hardware Acceleration (works with Intel HD Graphics 2000 and higher)". PRE_help wrote

Premiere Elements 13 does not support CUDA.

We do support Intel based hardware acceleration on 64-bit Windows installations. If you have the Intel HD Graphics display adaptor, look for the version number. If it is Intel HD Graphics 2xxx, or above (3xxx, 4xxx, 5xxx), the following features are accelerated

Rendering

Publish/Share (MPEG and AVC presets)

This is governed by a setting in preferences (Edit -> Preferences -> General -> Use Hardware Acceleration... checkbox). It is turned ON by default.

This is only for the mentioned Intel hardware. Even if you have a nVidia/ATI display adaptor that is generally considered "more powerful", the feature will not work unless the supported Intel dsplay adaptor is available.

Regards,

Premiere Elements Team

Please do not hesitate to ask if any questions on your Premiere Elements workflows.